New batch of pdp8 OMNIBUS to USB interface! Please Read and react!

[Guy Sotomayor Jr]

> On Feb 17, 2017, at 9:16 AM, Holm Tiffe <holm at freibergnet.de> wrote:
> 
> Philipp Hachtmann wrote:
> 
> [..]
>> 
>>> You might consider KiCAD as an alternative to Eagle.  It works pretty
>>> darned well.
>> Why should I? If you look at the board's size you probably see that it 
>> cannot be made using the free version. I own a paid Eagle 7 license. Why 
>> should I throw that away? Started to use Eagle as a child. Have my own 
>> libraries and footprints. Got used to the odds. And I won't use that 
>> KiCAD thing. It smells too much like dumb Arduino folks. And I do not 
>> want to share to much with that community.
>> I am an engineer and no Arduino fool... Even if KiCAD was a really great 
>> program, it would still have the smell of the 
>> copy-and-paste-maker-arduino-blinky-blinky-community.
>> 
>> Sorry for the rant but....  Arduino is just fubar..
>> 
>> If I would migrate to another EDA tool, I would probably migrate up to 
>> something more elaborated than Eagle or KiCAD :-)
>> 
>> 
>> Kind regards
>> 
>> Philipp
> 
> 
> I don't have a problem with your arduino related point of view, but I'm
> sure you never heard from the push and shove router that kicad implements?
> (take a look at youtube!)
> 
> If you have used it once, egale would look a lot like
> copy-and-paste-maker-arduino-blinky-blinky-community-thingy..
> 
> People at the swiss CERN are developing it, for sure they only know how
> to make arduinos, dnon't they?
> 

Just to add my $0.02 to this conversation.  I’m an Eagle (professional) user for
well over a decade.  The issue the Phillip mentioned about footprints and designs
is real.

On my last design I decided to give KiCAD a try and quickly realized that the
large libraries of parts and footprints I have would have to be completely re-done.
That made the bar too high to switch.  Most of my designs use footprints that I have
developed or are readily available.  Also, many new parts vendors supply Eagle
libraries for their parts so I don’t have to develop them.  I haven’t seen anything
for KiCAD regarding that…which means even more work for me.

Tool lock-in is a real phenomenon not just for the “wet-ware” but also for all of the
parts libraries that exist for the tools (either vendor, community or self developed).
So without a support infrastructure for parts libraries, a tool is just a “toy” regardless
of how good the underlying implementation is.

In terms of community supplied libraries, Eagle has those too and I’ve found that
by and large they are junk (it’s easier/quicker for me to create a part on my own
than to try and figure out what bizarre thing the contributor actually did and I still
need to check it anyway).  While I haven’t seen a lot of KiCAD contributed libraries
(that’s part of the problem) I have no expectation that they would be better than
the Eagle contributed libraries.

TTFN - Guy